This weekend was a wash for Paul.  He left a big Social Studies project to the last minute, despite us bugging him to bring it home and start working.  On Tuesday we finally resorted to the old “If you don’t bring it, we’ll go get it” which usually works.  The thought of one of us going to his school is almost always worse than what he doesn’t want to bring home.  Despite telling us that he was working on it for hours a day at school he had almost nothing done, and made very little progress of the week.  This led us to another homework weekend with Paul.

Homework weekends used to be pure hell, and then we learned about movement breaks.  Let Paul go and do his own thing for a little while has made things much better.  Naturally we need to structure the timing of his breaks, he wants to take a 15 minute break for every 5 minutes of work.  We use his screen time timer, and let take a 15 minute break every hour.  When Paul finally finished his project, he still had time to make it baseball practice.  When I told him to get ready, he told me that he wasn’t going to baseball, he was going to play video games.  I told him he needed some fresh air because he had used all of his movement breaks to play video games.

So we got to practice late, and by the time we got there Paul had forgotten that he didn’t want to go.

~Living with Paul

Sorry, it’s been awhile since my last post. In addition to the joys of shift work there, is allot on my plate right now and this kind of fell to the side.

This week Paul and his friends got caught throwing things in front of cars during lunch at school. Paul’s acceptance of guilt varied depending on who he talked to. When talking to the Vice-Principle he admitted responsibility and said that he understood that it was wrong. Satisfied the v-p sent the boys to clean the lunch room while they thought about they had done. Paul decided not to go and went back outside. After lunch he was asked why he didn’t go to the lunch room to help clean. He told his teacher that he didn’t do anything wrong so he wasn’t going to have a consequence. The school called and told Jen what had happened so when Paul got home she asked him about it and was told that he didn’t do anything wrong so he wasn’t going to have a consequence. He got a little cheekier and told her that if they needed people to clean the lunch room they should get teachers to do it.

When I woke up Jen filled me in on the happenings of the day and told Paul that he should tell me what he did at school. He refused. I didn’t want to press the issue then because he had baseball so I wanted until after. On the ride home I asked him what he did. To my surprise he told me. He told me that his friends had been throwing things in front of cars and he had been trying to stop them but they wouldn’t listen. I asked him why he didn’t leave and he said “Because I didn’t want them to get into trouble.” I tried to come up with a way to explain guilt by association to him. I told him that because he was there, even if he didn’t throw anything into the street, he was still going to be punished.

At that point his story changed as he blurted out “But the cars didn’t hit anything that I put in the road!” I changed my tactic and told him that it didn’t matter if a car hit it or not. The fact was that he had done it, gotten caught and now he had to face his consequence so he would be cleaning up the lunch room tomorrow. To my surprise he just sighed and said OK.

When we got home we talked about his Social Studies project. It’s due on Monday so we told him that it would be best if worked on it before going to a dance. He seemed fine with this until I left the room. He told Jen that he wasn’t going to skip the dance and that he would work on his project during lunch. She reminded him that he couldn’t because he had to clean the lunchroom. That’s when he lost it, he started ranting and raving, “I didn’t do anything wrong”, “It was my friends”, “I was just watching”, “I wasn’t even there”, and the list goes on.

When I returned I was a little disappointed, but not too surprised. We tried to make Paul understand that he didn’t have any options, and that we had already talked to the school. This really wasn’t going anywhere so I finally just told him that if he didn’t clean the lunchroom the school was going to call, and if I got that call he would miss the whole dance and get to work on his project with me.

The next day he went and cleaned the lunchroom.  It took him a couple of minutes, so he worked on his project and went to the whole dance.

Next week I plan to ask him what he learned.

~Living with Paul